Okay... I need to get this underway. I'm spending too much time handling things myself and not teaching you guys to do it. Lynn, are you still sitting out or are you ready to join in? (No pressure... just wanting to know where we're at.) Firehawk 2.0 is somewhere out on the horizon, but Karen's not finding much time to work on it anymore. I blame Usenet. So we're going to have to forge ahead without the benefits of the new software and work with the existing system. It should smooth out fairly quickly. I've created an editors "home base" page to give us a bit of focus... you'll want to save a bookmark, but everything else you need should end up being linked from this page. http://www.phoenyx.net/listowners/editors.html It's not pretty... I'll get it stuck into the standard templates pretty soon. (Karen maintains the Phoenyx ones and trying to work on them makes my head spin. She and I organize this stuff very differently.) The page contains a "to do" list for myself concerning editors... let me know what you might like added to it. Martin, since SF has an over-abundance of editors, I'd like to move you over to Fantasy, since you volunteered to work on both. That's the place with the most volume. There aren't any pending proposals in the queue. When new ones show up, I'm going to push to get you guys to handle them... I'll walk you through the process as necessary, but I need to get out of doing these all myself. ==== I've been giving a lot of thought to community building and getting the members more involved in building the Phoenyx. If Martin will move over to Fantasy, I can concentrate on teaching everyone how to handle the editor job (and upgrading the server and getting security up to snuff). If anyone cares, I'm currently reading "Community Building on the Web" by Amy Jo Kim. It's pretty good, looking at it from many different angles, including mailing lists. The Phoenyx suffers from having lots of little communities (the lists) but with nothing that really ties them together into a larger community. And a sense of belonging is essential to cultivating volunteers. The "core" of the Phoenyx community is too small. Your ideas are very welcome. The Phoenyx is falling behind... there's nobody out there quite like us, but there are several game-hosting sites that are flashier and have a lot more resources than we do. We have to establish ourselves as being low-flash, high-quality... most of the game-hosting sites make no effort to screen their games for quality. We have to build a reputation and make sure people know we're here. Amythest Alliance recommends some little podunk mailing list host that caters specifically to mailing lists... but this host doesn't hold a candle to the Phoenyx. We need to make these kinds of sites aware that we exist and *we* need to be the ones being recommended. We need to find a way to tie our general membership together. I think Karen and I need to get back to the monthly newsletter thing, and we need to be a lot more active about keeping the front page updated and interesting. (The editors ought to help us with that part... feeding us topics of interest.) One of the things "Building Communities..." talks about is the need to recognize community members for excellence. I'd like to start by highlighting some of our GM's... maybe a hall-of-fame of sorts. Then I'd like to get the GM's to nominate their *players*... I think excellent players bring a lot to a game and would like to give them some attention. Basically, I want to reward people for participating and make them feel a part of things... and it gives newer members someone to look up to and a goal to achieve. What think ye? -- -------------------------------------------------------------- Listowner tools are found at http://www.phoenyx.net/listowners
